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A symphony at your fingertips

Shane Richmond

"His bass clarinet is in a truck on its way to Bonn, but we'll sort it out with a spare." It's October and app developers Touch Press are in a production meeting, wrestling with some of the more unusual problems created by their new app, The Orchestra.

Produced in partnership with the London-based Philharmonia Orchestra and the Music Sales Group, The Orchestra is an iPad app of extraordinary scope and ambition. Designed as an introduction to orchestral music, it combines video of the Philharmonia playing eight classical pieces, scrolling musical scores, commentary from conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and his musicians, and an interactive guide to every instrument in the orchestra.

Missing clarinets are just part of the challenge: there are musical scores to proof, video to synchronise and the challenge of making the final package fit within the two-gigabyte size limit imposed by Apple on apps for its iOS mobile operating system.

At that October meeting, Touch Press had the bulk of the app working in demo form but there was still some debate about how the final version should look. What if someone wants to watch only video? What if they want just the musical score? How many versions of the score should there be? And how do you arrange all those options?

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Even deciding whether there should be something as straightforward as a play/pause button takes time.

"Every button you add, you take away clarity," says designer Matt Aitken, as the production team debates the layouts. Max Whitby, the chief executive of Touch Press, decides that simplicity needs to be the priority: "Let's just do one thing really well."

Work began on The Orchestra in September 2011, when the Philharmonia spent a day performing while cameras captured them from every angle – even from directly above. Now the app is finished, at a cost of £250,000 ($A385,000), and available from the iTunes Store for £9.99.

Putting together the many elements wasn't an easy task, says developer Richard Zito. "The trickiest part is the music notation, because the notation software, Sibelius, isn't really made for this purpose. We had to force it into behaving the way we wanted it and then, from that, we ended up with one big image of the entire score.

"Dealing with the sheer size of that [the score], adding metadata to it, to know where every single note is and every single bar is and doing this in a way that's repeatable ... was a significant amount of prototyping work."

Though stories abound of bedroom developers who become millionaires as their app turns into a surprise hit, the real drivers of the apps boom are small agencies producing their own apps or making them for big-name brands. More than three-quarters of the top app makers are small businesses, according to a recent survey.

A study by TechNet estimated that 500,000 jobs have been created in the "apps economy" in the US since Apple and Google opened their mobile app stores in 2008. In Britain, recruiter ReThink says app developers are now earning more than web developers; a salary of £70,000 is not uncommon, the firm says.

Apps have "really made mobile media mainstream", says Jack Kent, media analyst at the company. "We expect that Apple and Google will continue to lead that market."

He adds: "There has been a shift where publishers are looking to release fewer apps, with a focus on quality."

Touch Press is keen to concentrate on quality, but it also charges more than most app developers. Its apps cost mostly £10 – still less than a coffee-table book but, Kent says, against the trend of the market, which is moving towards "freemium" apps – free downloads with extras that can be paid for.

Touch Press, says Whitby, is "striving to create a sustainable market for very high-quality titles at a fair price".

Another area in which Touch Press bucks the trend is by remaining an iOS-only developer, despite the growth of Google's Android operating system.

"Many Touch Press titles demand very high performance from the CPU and graphics system. The Orchestra is a case in point. Many Android devices simply could not cope," says Whitby. "Then we have concerns about the hardware inconsistency between devices and the plethora of installed OS versions."

However, he adds that Touch Press has no "philosophical objections" to Android.

When Touch Press launched its first app, The Elements, to coincide with the release of the iPhone, Stephen Fry said it was so good that it was worth the price of an iPad by itself. There are likely to be plenty who would make the same claim for The Orchestra.